Siegmund made a great effort to keep the control of his body. The
hill-side, the gorse, when he stood up, seemed to have fallen back into
shadowed vagueness about him. They were meaningless dark heaps at some
distance, very great, it seemed.

'I can't get hold of them,' he said distractedly to himself. He felt
detached from the earth, from all the near, concrete, beloved things; as
if these had melted away from him, and left him, sick and unsupported,
somewhere alone on the edge of an enormous space. He wanted to lie down
again, to relieve himself of the sickening effort of supporting and
controlling his body. If he could lie down again perfectly still he need
not struggle to animate the cumbersome matter of his body, and then he
would not feel thus sick and outside himself.

But Helena was speaking to him, telling him they would see the
moon-path. They must set off downhill. He felt her arm clasped firmly,
joyously, round his waist. Therein was his stability and warm support.
Siegmund felt a keen flush of pitiful tenderness for her as she walked
with buoyant feet beside him, clasping him so happily, all unconscious.
This pity for her drew him nearer to life.

He shuddered lightly now and again, as they stepped lurching down the
hill. He set his jaws hard to suppress this shuddering. It was not in
his limbs, or even on the surface of his body, for Helena did not notice
it. Yet he shuddered almost in anguish internally.

His thought consisted of these detached phrases, which he spoke verbally
to himself. Between-whiles he was conscious only of an almost
insupportable feeling of sickness, as a man feels who is being brought
from under an anaesthetic; also he was vaguely aware of a teeming stir
of activity, such as one may hear from a closed hive, within him.

They swung rapidly downhill. Siegmund still shuddered, but not so
uncontrollably. They came to a stile which they must climb. As he
stepped over it needed a concentrated effort of will to place his foot
securely on the step. The effort was so great that he became
conscious of it.

He tried to examine himself. He thought of all the organs of his
body--his brain, his heart, his liver. There was no pain, and nothing
wrong with any of them, he was sure. His dim searching resolved itself
into another detached phrase. 'There is nothing the matter with me,'
he said.

Then he continued vaguely wondering, recalling the sensation of wretched
sickness which sometimes follows drunkenness, thinking of the times when
he had fallen ill.

'But I am not like that,' he said, 'because I don't feel tremulous. I am
sure my hand is steady.'

Helena stood still to consider the road. He held out his hand before
him. It was motionless as a dead flower on this silent night.

'Yes, I think this is the right way,' said Helena, and they set off
again, as if gaily.

'It certainly feels rather deathly,' said Siegmund to himself. He
remembered distinctly, when he was a child and had diphtheria, he had
stretched himself in the horrible sickness, which he felt was--and here
he chose the French word--'l'agonie'. But his mother had seen and had
cried aloud, which suddenly caused him to struggle with all his soul to
spare her her suffering.

'Certainly it is like that,' he said. 'Certainly it is rather deathly. I
wonder how it is.'

'Lost! What matter!' he answered indifferently, and Helena pressed him
tighter, hearer to her in a kind of triumph. 'But did we not come this
way?' he added.

'No. See'--her voice was reeded with restrained emotion--'we have
certainly not been along this bare path which dips up and down.'

'Well, then, we must merely keep due eastward, towards the moon pretty
well, as much as we can,' said Siegmund, looking forward over the down,
where the moon was wrestling heroically to win free of the pack of
clouds which hung on her like wolves on a white deer. As he looked at
the moon he felt a sense of companionship. Helena, not understanding,
left him so much alone; the moon was nearer.

Siegmund continued to review the last hours. He had been so wondrously
happy. The world had been filled with a new magic, a wonderful, stately
beauty which he had perceived for the first time. For long hours he had
been wandering in another--a glamorous, primordial world.

'I suppose,' he said to himself, 'I have lived too intensely, I seem to
have had the stars and moon and everything else for guests, and now
they've gone my house is weak.'

So he struggled to diagnose his case of splendour and sickness. He
reviewed his hour of passion with Helena.

'Surely,' he told himself, 'I have drunk life too hot, and it has hurt
my cup. My soul seems to leak out--I am half here, half gone away.
That's why I understand the trees and the night so painfully.'

Then he came to the hour of Helena's strange ecstasy over him. That,
somehow, had filled him with passionate grief. It was happiness
concentrated one drop too keen, so that what should have been vivid wine
was like a pure poison scathing him. But his consciousness, which had
been unnaturally active, now was dulling. He felt the blood flowing
vigorously along the limbs again, and stilling has brain, sweeping away
his sickness, soothing him.

'I suppose,' he said to himself for the last time, 'I suppose living too
intensely kills you, more or less.'

Then Siegmund forgot. He opened his eyes and saw the night about him.
The moon had escaped from the cloud-pack, and was radiant behind a fine
veil which glistened to her rays, and which was broidered with a
lustrous halo, very large indeed, the largest halo Siegmund had ever
seen. When the little lane turned full towards the moon, it seemed as if
Siegmund and Helena would walk through a large Moorish arch of
horse-shoe shape, the enormous white halo opening in front of them. They
walked on, keeping their faces to the moon, smiling with wonder and a
little rapture, until once mote the little lane curved wilfully, and
they were walking north. Helena observed three cottages crouching under
the hill and under trees to cover themselves from the magic of the
moonlight.

'We certainly did not come this way before,' she said triumphantly. The
idea of being lost delighted her.

Siegmund looked round at the grey hills smeared over with a low, dim
glisten of moon-mist. He could not yet fully realize that he was walking
along a lane in the Isle of Wight. His surroundings seemed to belong to
some state beyond ordinary experience--some place in romance, perhaps,
or among the hills where Bruenhild lay sleeping in her large bright halo
of fire. How could it be that he and Helena were two children of London
wandering to find their lodging in Freshwater? He sighed, and looked
again over the hills where the moonlight was condensing in mist
ethereal, frail, and yet substantial, reminding him of the way the manna
must have condensed out of the white moonlit mists of Arabian deserts.

'We may be on the road to Newport,' said Helena presently, 'and the
distance is ten miles.'

She laughed, not caring in the least whither they wandered, exulting in
this wonderful excursion! She and Siegmund alone in a glistening
wilderness of night at the back of habited days and nights! Siegmund
looked at her. He by no means shared her exultation, though he
sympathized with it. He walked on alone in his deep seriousness, of
which she was not aware. Yet when he noticed her abandon, he drew her
nearer, and his heart softened with protecting tenderness towards her,
and grew heavy with responsibility.

The fields breathed off a scent as if they were come to life with the
night, and were talking with fragrant eagerness. The farms huddled
together in sleep, and pulled the dark shadow over them to hide from the
supernatural white night; the cottages were locked and darkened. Helena
walked on in triumph through this wondrous hinterland of night, actively
searching for the spirits, watching the cottages they approached,
listening, looking for the dreams of those sleeping inside, in the
darkened rooms. She imagined she could see the frail dream-faces at the
windows; she fancied they stole out timidly into the gardens, and went
running away among the rabbits on the gleamy hill-side. Helena laughed
to herself, pleased with her fancy of wayward little dreams playing with
weak hands and feet among the large, solemn-sleeping cattle. This was
the first time, she told herself, that she had ever been out among the
grey-frocked dreams and white-armed fairies. She imagined herself lying
asleep in her room, while her own dreams slid out down the moonbeams.
She imagined Siegmund sleeping in his room, while his dreams, dark-eyed,
their blue eyes very dark and yearning at night-time, came wandering
over the grey grass seeking her dreams.

So she wove her fancies as she walked, until for very weariness she was
fain to remember that it was a long way--a long way. Siegmund's arm was
about her to support her; she rested herself upon it. They crossed a
stile and recognized, on the right of the path, the graveyard of the
Catholic chapel. The moon, which the days were paring smaller with
envious keen knife, shone upon the white stones in the burial-ground.
The carved Christ upon His cross hung against a silver-grey sky. Helena
looked up wearily, bowing to the tragedy. Siegmund also looked, and
bowed his head.

'Thirty years of earnest love; three years' life like a passionate
ecstasy-and it was finished. He was very great and very wonderful. I am
very insignificant, and shall go out ignobly. But we are the same; love,
the brief ecstasy, and the end. But mine is one rose, and His all the
white beauty in the world.'

Siegmund felt his heart very heavy, sad, and at fault, in presence of
the Christ. Yet he derived comfort from the knowledge that life was
treating him in the same manner as it had treated the Master, though his
compared small and despicable with the Christ-tragedy. Siegmund stepped
softly into the shadow of the pine copse.

'Let me get under cover,' he thought. 'Let me hide in it; it is good,
the sudden intense darkness. I am small and futile: my small,
futile tragedy!'

Helena shrank in the darkness. It was almost terrible to her, and the
silence was like a deep pit. She shrank to Siegmund. He drew her closer,
leaning over her as they walked, trying to assure her. His heart was
heavy, and heavy with a tenderness approaching grief, for his small,
brave Helena.

'Quite, quite sure,' she whispered confidently in reply. And presently
they came out into the hazy moonlight, and began stumbling down the
steep hill. They were both very tired, both found it difficult to go
with ease or surety this sudden way down. Soon they were creeping
cautiously across the pasture and the poultry farm. Helena's heart was
beating, as she imagined what a merry noise there would be should they
wake all the fowls. She dreaded any commotion, any questioning, this
night, so she stole carefully along till they issued on the high-road
not far from home.